FOR THIS PRESIDENT, THE ESSENCE OF WISDOM LIES IN KNOWING WHEN NOT TO CHANGE

George Bush is roaming around his Prairie Chapel ranch house in boots, slacks and a linen shirt, naming the native grasses, spotting the herons--admiring the butterflies, for heaven's sake. This is to be a day of image softening, and another magazine's crew is waiting to do a family photo shoot. Bush has remade this Texas landscape to suit him: put in a lake and stocked it, planted the oaks and laid out the house so the winds would sweep through it. That's the way of his world: something to be shaped, by work and will. Whatever his handlers say, the softening...